Circe: Chapters 6–10

All my life had been spent in the same dim halls, or walking the same stunted shore with its threadbare woods. I was not prepared for such profusion and I felt the sudden urge to throw myself in, like a frog into a pond.

All these things had to be worked and learned through errors and trials, burnt fingers and fetid clouds that sent me running outside to cough in the garden.

I found I had a knack for illusion, summoning shadow crumbs for the mice to creep after, making pale minnows leap from the waves beneath a cormorant’s beak.

“Something more lurid. Dragonish. A troupe of dancing sphinxes. Blood dripping from the sky.”

I had scarcely known true intelligence — I had spoken to Prometheus for only a moment, and in all the rest of Oceanos' halls most of what passed as cleverness was only archness and spite.

“For novelty’s sake, of course. The first good deed in your dissolute life. Aren't you curious what it would feel like?”

For that flower, so delicate it could dissolve beneath your stepping foot, carried within it the unyielding power of apotrope, the turning aside of evil. Cursebreaker. Ward and bulwark against ruin, worshipped like a god, for it was pure.

One of the boars grew fractious, shoving and grunting to air his authority.

I focused instead on Perses: his lounging, smug face, his puffy muscles and thick neck, his long-fingered, indolent hands.

My voice had changed too, it was deep and swollen with divine hauteur.

He was holding a sword, and I saw that the other men were similarly armed with spears and daggers and crude cudgels.

Even Polydamas, in his borrowed tunic, obeyed. I almost wanted to laugh. I had never been given such deference in my life.

“Pasiphaë,” I said, “do not be perverse. You sent for me, now use me.”

I traced the mosses, the hummocks of ground upwards, and, at the base of a white poplar, I found a blooming patch of dittany.

Beside her, on an alabaster chair, Minos looked old and puffed, like something left dead in the waves.